What were we doing before this trip?

 So back to the questions you had for us. Here's one from Inga in Norway:

Hi Taru! I've fallen head over heels with your blog. Lovely pictures and you write beautiful texts I can reqognize myself in. It also remindes me of what I really want from this life - it's terrifyingly easy to loose yourself and your dreams in the everyday buzz. I was wondering if you (and Alex) have studied, in case what? And when you were in Dubai and Barcelona, what did you do for a living? Good luck further on, I'm going to follow you along the way :) Inga

Many of you have asked this before, so here's an attempt to make a short recap of our past. As for Alex professional background: He owned and operated a successful mastering studio when we met, a beautiful studio that he sold just before we took off on this journey. He had it running for approximately ten years of his life, first in France, then Barcelona, following a mastering engineering education of three years after high school. Before starting with mastering professionally, he was working in various recording and mixing studios, as well as a FOH engineer during concerts. In the weekends, he also spent many years of his twenties and early thirties working as a DJ in great clubs and bars around in Europe.

Around the age of 24-26, he also had time to be a surf teacher on the Atlantic coast of France in the summers. Someone earlier asked why Alex has such good knowledge in composite work, and that's because as a boat owner for many years in different periods, he's always been interested in the structural aspect of the boats he owned and so he's taken some courses in France when he was still living there. In between all of this, he occasionally also worked with composite for several yachts. As well as occasionally worked as a skipper for private yachts in the Med.

Alex in his studio in Barcelona around that time that we first met.

My part will be a bit longer as so many girls have asked me this along the years. If you were looking for a traditional role model, I must make you disappointed because I basically skipped much of my studies in high school and have no post-secondary education whatsoever. I've always worked hard though with the exception of a couple years, and I've tried many different things on the way. To list a few of the random jobs that I've had until the age of 23 or so: Worked with market research, as a receptionist, as a conference organizer, waiter, shop assistant in a delicacy shop  and all those things one can do when you're young and not necessarily have an education. Education was never really important to me as I always saw the world as my teacher. That I could gain the knowledge and experience I needed out there somewhere through travels, encounters with different types of people from different cultures and social backgrounds. I always worked for like six months or a year, then traveled, then got back home to work again and so it continued until the day that I realized I wanted something on my own. I decided pretty early that if I was to work for someone, I'd do it for myself. And I always lived by the motto that if I was going to spend a minimum of forty hours a week on working to pay my bills, it better be with something that I truthfully loved. So before Dubai, and Barcelona round 2 (I lived in Bcn one summer in between work in my early twenties too), I opened my very own fashion store online:

 

With some help by a government grant that I got as my business plan was approved, I got my little business started. I had that online store running for almost three years until the day that I completely lost the passion I had when I first started, and it also didn't give enough profit for me to continue working as hard as I was doing. Here's a couple photos from that time:

I was so blonde back then.. first image is from my store. In addition to the online shop I had, I also had a physical store for six months or so. The location was ideal but the rent was terribly high so I closed that store down after a trial period and went back to focus only on the online part. Second image is from Alexander mc Queens after party in Paris on one of the buying trips during fashion week. 

My time as a store owner brought me endless of lessons and it was naturally a very good educational time for me. After I closed down my shop, I gave myself the permission to take a break and leave Sweden again to explore and indulge in another culture and country. The search for something unique, wild and different brought me to Dubai where I had visited a couple times previous. I don't know if you've ever been to Dubai but it's often called Las Vegas on speed. I can with honesty say that my time there was probably not the most productive year of my life. I wished to open a fashion agency there to import and introduce a few Scandinavian fashion labels to the UAE. This proved to be a great challenge of course and all the complications with paperwork, local sponsors and the huge investment required slowly got me realize that those particular dreams probably were too massive for a little girl from Scandinavia to fulfill on her own. During the time that I was in the Middle East, I probably spent around 70% of my waking time on partying and enjoying life, in Dubai and the neighboring countries. Not sure how much I did actually enjoy the thing we call real life, but there was a lot of partying going on for sure. Here's a couple images from my time in Dubai:

Dubai is a very hectic, superficial and somewhat mentally draining city to live in though it was just what I needed/wanted during that particular time. My time there opened my eyes to many things that wouldn't normally enter my membrane so for all that I'm very thankful. It taught me a lot of life lessons. I left the UAE around a year or so after I got there and moved back to Barcelona where I had briefly lived in my early twenties. Shortly after I had gotten back to Spain and regained my entrepreneurial energy, I built an online tourist guide for the discerning traveler in Barcelona. I obviously had the online experience from my days as a web-shop owner, and eating and drinking out in beautiful places were some of my greatest interests so why not make a business out of it. This is the online guide that I developed:

I collaborated with the best hotels, restaurants, bars, nightclubs and shops in Barcelona. All worked just as I had envisioned and I had some great advertisers booked. But then in the midst of establishing my new business, I met Alex..

Newly in love on Alex previous beautiful little boat, Caos, in which we started this journey.

I can't say it was the easiest decision I have done in my life, to let go of the new endeavor that I had just built up and got started, something that I truly loved and felt passionated about, in a city where I felt right at home and surrounded by a lot of people that I loved. But something with Alex offered and tempted me with more. It was not very easy for him either to let go of his life and to sell a business he had operated and built up for ten years, but somehow we both just did it.

 

It wasn't like we were looking for something to happen as we both were very busy doing what we were doing. We were in fact very happy and content with our lives in Barcelona as well as with our own achievements in our day to day reality. But we still decided to let go and get out there. I guess that in the end, we all are suckers for real love and once you find that special one, nothing can come in between. And here we are, three years later. First year was spent on accustom ourselves to living aboard Alex's boat together and get rid of our material things. And the following two years has now been spent sailing from Spain to Morocco, across the Atlantic ocean, sold the old boat and got a new one, explored a new world here in the Caribbean, we've slowly but surely built up our little (blog) business, finalized some major work on the new-old boat and that's basically where we are right now. It has been hard many times in between, you know that already if you've read our blog, but so worth it if you look at what we have actually achieved. 

So if we're talking about education and career, one could say that we now have combined some of our previous experiences into something new. The journey, and this blog, is sort of an extension of many of our interests combined. Though we both miss our previous lives very much from time to time, we both truly feel as if we have found the right thing for us, at least for this moment of our lives. Like always, there's always a way to do what you truthfully love, and if there's no obvious, beaten path towards your dreams, one can always create that road for oneself, from scratch.

I hope this answers your question Inga!